Increasingly, people are relying on computing services and functionality that is provided from remote computing devices that are communicationally coupled to each individual user's computing device. For example, web search engines, cloud-backed business applications and web-based video streaming and social media entertainment are becoming increasingly popular. Moreover, the prevalence of high-speed computer network communication capabilities for people in different parts of the world, both in their office as well as in their homes, has increased accessibility and aided adoption and utilization of these network-based services. This has correspondingly placed heavy data processing and computational demands on the providers of such services.
To provide such data and processing capabilities, via network communications, computing devices are often centralized in a single location. Such a centralized location typically comprises hundreds or thousands of computing devices, typically mounted in vertically oriented racks. Such a collection of computing devices, as well as the associated hardware necessary to infrastructure such computing devices, and the physical structure that houses the computing devices and associated hardware, is traditionally referred to as a “data center”. With the increasing availability of high-speed network communication capabilities, and thus the increasing provision of data and services from centralized locations, as well as the traditional utilization of data centers, such as the provision of advanced computing services and massive amounts of computing processing capability, the size and quantity of data centers continues to increase.
Data centers typically comprise both the computing devices that perform the processing that the data center provides to its customers and infrastructure devices that provide power, cooling and other like infrastructure services to provide a proper operating environment for the computing devices. The infrastructure devices of the data center can be managed by computing devices that are dedicated specifically to such management of infrastructure devices, and which are not part of the computing devices that perform the processing that the data center provides to its customers. The computing devices that perform the processing that the data center provides to its customers are typically housed in chassis, which are then, in turn, arranged in vertical racks. Each chassis includes, not only the computing devices performing the processing of the data center, but also computing devices dedicated to managing hardware and software aspects of the chassis itself, such as monitoring the power supply or fans of the chassis, monitoring the computing hardware installed in the chassis, and other like chassis management functionality. To save cost, such chassis manager computing devices typically do not comprise the processing capabilities of the computing devices installed in the chassis.
Redundancy is utilized to protect against failures that reduce the ability of the data center to provide computing services and, consequently, negatively impact the revenue of the data center. As such, various infrastructure functions of the data center are provided by primary systems, which are, in turn, backed up by secondary or tertiary systems. For example, the power provided to a data center, such as electrical grid power, is typically backed up by a backup power source, such as a generator. In a similar manner, the computing devices that manage and control the infrastructure devices of the data center typically comprise some amount of redundancy. As a result, data centers typically comprise at least three different sets of computing devices, including the computing devices that actually perform the processing that the data center sells to its customers, the chassis manager computing devices, and the infrastructure device management computing devices.